The Future Phenomenon

A pallid sky, above the world that ends from decrepitude, will perhaps depart with the clouds: the tatters of the worn-out purple of sunsets fade in a river sleeping to the horizon submerged in rays and water. The trees are bored and, under their whited leaves (from the dust of time rather than of roadways), rises the canvas house of the Showman of Things Past: many a streetlamp awaits the dusk and revives the faces of an unhappy crowd, vanquished by the immortal malady and the sin of the ages, of men close to their puny accomplices pregnant with the miserable fruits the earth will die from. In the unquiet silence of all the eyes supplicating yonder the sun which, under the water, sinks with the despair of a cry, behold the simple patter: “No sign regales you with the interior spectacle, for there is now not one painter capable of giving one sad shadow of it. I bring, living (and preserved across the years by sovereign science) a Woman of bygone days. Some madness, original and naïve, an ecstasy of gold, I know not what! by her called her hair, plies itself with the grace of fabrics around a face lit by the blood-red nudity of her lips. In place of vain vestments, she has a body; and her eyes, like rare stones, are not worth the look that comes from her happy flesh: from her breasts raised as if they were full of a milk eternal, tips toward the sky, to her lissome legs that keep the salt of the first sea.” Recalling their poor spouses, bald, morbid and full of horror, the husbands press: the women as well out of curiosity, melancholy, wish to see.

When all have contemplated the noble creature, vestige of some epoch already accursed, some indifferent, for they have not had the strength to comprehend, but others broken and their eyelids moist with resigned tears will look at each other; while the poets of those times, feeling rekindled their extinguished eyes, will head for their lamp, their brains drunk a moment with a confused glory, haunted with Rhythm and in forgetfulness of existing in an epoch that survives beauty.

Stéphane Mallarmé